Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the Cia, and the Mafia

by Paul L. Williams

Over the next decade, scores of additional Vatican officials, including cardinals, Roman Catholic hierarchs, and prominent bishops and archbishops, would become members of Masonic lodges—many with ties to P2.22 It is difficult to believe that the supreme pontiffs (Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI) were blissfully unaware that so many of the Church’s dignitaries were practicing Freemasons. And it remains equally mind-boggling that the pontiffs elevated these clerics to loftier positions upon learning of their membership in P2 and other Masonic lodges. As it transformed into one of the world’s richest and most powerful institutions, the Roman Catholic Church shed many of its long-held doctrines for the sake of political expediency and financial gain, including the condemnations of Freemasonry and usury. This transformation crystallized with the pope’s embrace of Licio Gelli—an avowed atheist and the Grand Master of P2—who became a Knight of Malta, one of the favored sons of Holy Mother Church.

In 1947, Theodor Soucek and Dr. Hugo Rössner were arrested in Vienna when the Austrian police discovered that they had recruited a secret army of former Nazi soldiers and right-wing partisans to prepare for a Soviet invasion and had amassed a cache of sophisticated weapons that included German rocket artillery. In court, prosecutors argued that Soucek and Rössner had concocted plans to attack and kill members of the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs). Instead of refuting this allegation, the two men presented themselves as defenders of the home-land and maintained that their efforts were funded by the newly created CIA. The realization that a covert army, funded by a foreign government, was operating on Austrian soil sent shockwaves throughout the country. Soucek and Rössner were convicted of sedition and sentenced to death in 1949. However, after serving a short stint in prison, they were pardoned by Austrian Chancellor Theodor Körner without reason or explanation.

The presence of Gladio in Germany came to light in 1952 when Hans Otto, a former SS officer, walked into a police station in Frankfurt and announced that he “… belonged to a political resistance group, the task of which was to carry out sabotage activities and blow up bridges in case of a Soviet invasion….” He said that, although the initiative was made up of former Nazis, new recruits were not expected to espouse neofascist beliefs but only to manifest a deep-seated hatred of Communism.

Georg August Zinn, the Hessen prime minister, became so alarmed by Otto’s testimony that he ordered the arrest of one hundred members of the TD-BDJ and called for a full-scale investigation of the resistance group. Zinn’s request was denied by the Bundesgerichtshof, the country’s highest court (located in Karlsruhe, in southwest Germany), and all members of the secret army were released without comment.

In 1953, additional information about Gladio surfaced in Sweden with the arrest of Otto Hallberg, a notorious racist and former SS commander, on charges of promoting terrorism. Hallberg openly admitted that he was the leader of a covert army named “Sveaborg” that had been created by US intelligence officers to ward off any Soviet plans for the annexation of Scandinavia. Relaxed and confident, the former Nazi commander rightfully predicted that any investigation into his unit and any police charges raised against him would be squashed by higher authorities, since no Swedish official wanted news to surface concerning the extent to which the Swedish government remained under the direct sway of the CIA and NATO.

in the 1963 election. Many members of the Curia felt the Left’s success was attributable to Pope John’s conciliatory attitude toward the Communists. This was the first election in which the Christian Democrats were not officially endorsed by the Italian Bishops Conference.

When John XXIII died of stomach cancer on June 3, 1963, the CIA under McCone became intent upon influencing the outcome of the conclave so that another “pink pope” would not ascend to the throne of St. Peter. The Agency’s favored candidate was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the former Bishop of Milan, whose father had been the director of Catholic Action and a member of the Italian Parliament.

One of Montini’s first acts as Pope Paul VI was the appointment of Gelli as Equitem Ordinis Sancti Silvestri Papae (a Knight in the Order of St. Silvester), one of Catholicism’s highest awards.40 The knighting was extraordinary since Gelli remained an avowed atheist who had never performed an act in the service of Holy Mother Church. Nevertheless, the ceremony was of profound significance to Gladio operatives, since it served to confirm the close ties between the Vatican and P2, as well as the Holy See’s reliance on Gelli and other CIA agents to maintain its privileged place of power and independence within Italy.

The son of a Tuscan miller, Gelli was born in Pistoria on April 21, 1919.

he became the key liaison officer to the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Hermann Göring. During the Allied occupation in 1943, he escaped incarceration by volunteering to serve with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army.

Gelli gained entry to the Vatican, where he united with Fr. Krunoslav Draganović, a Franciscan monk and member of the Ustashi (a Croatian fascist group during World War II), to set up the ratlines by which war criminals, including members of the Nazi High Command, could escape to South American and other havens of refuge.

Thanks in part to Gelli, over sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and their dependents made their way to the United States to inaugurate the space age. Many of these Nazis ended up working as aircraft designers and engineers at the Glenn L. Martin Company (later the Lockheed Martin Corporation) and Republic Aviation.

By 1947, the CIC was shelling out $1,400 to Fr. Draganović and Gelli for each war criminal who was sent to their care.

One of the most notorious Nazis to come under the care of Gelli and Fr. Draganović was Klaus Barbie. The so-called “Butcher of Lyons” was responsible for 4,342 murders and 7,591 deportations to death camps during his two-year posting in the French city. After the war, US intelligence placed him in a safe house in Augsburg, provided him with a sanitized identity, and granted him a generous stipend of $1,700 a month. In 1983, the Justice Department belatedly admitted that US intelligence officials had arranged for Barbie’s escape to Bolivia

Throughout his twenty-year stay in South America, Barbie proved to be of crucial importance to the CIA by forging close ties to La Mafia Cruzena (a drug cartel formed by Hugo Banzer Suárez, a man trained by the US military at Fort Hunt and the Escuela de Golpes in Panama), and, thereby, securing a new source of funding for mounting attacks against leftist regimes.

The operation of the ratline brought Gelli in close contact with the future Pope Paul VI. At the close of the war, Monsignor Montini had been placed in charge of Caritas Italiana, a Vatican charity that provided “protection” for German soldiers and Nazi sympathizers. The protection came to include the issuance of refugee travel documents (replete with new identities) to such illustrious figures as Hans Hefelman, a principal figure in the Third Reich’s euthanasia program, and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary.

In addition to the ratline, Gelli played a key role in the smuggling of over $80 million in gold and silver bars from the Ustashi treasury in Croatia to the Vatican Bank. Holy Mother Church was very pleased to receive the deposit for “safe-keeping,” even though Gelli squirreled away 150 gold bars for himself.

In Italy, Gelli served as the CIA’s liaison to General Giovanni de Lorenzo, who, upon the recommendation of US Ambassador Claire Booth Luce, had become the head of the Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate (SIFAR), Italy’s armed forced information service. SIFAR was the clandestine agency that coordinated the activities of Gladio units throughout the country.

on October 27, 1962, with the assassination of Enrico Mattei, the founder of Italy’s largest oil concern ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi).57 Such attacks, Gelli later told BBC correspondent Allan Francovich, were conducted in accordance with US Army Field Manual 30–31B, which outlined the new tactics to be employed by the Gladio units.

On Election Day in April 1963, the CIA nightmare materialized. The Communists gained strength, amassing 25 percent of the vote, while all other parties lost seats, and Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party, in an effort to assuage the growing number of leftists in his government, named Socialists to cabinet posts. But the Communists were not pacified by Moro’s appointments. They too wanted key government positions. In May 1963, the large union of construction workers, under the influence of the PCI, held a demonstration in Rome. The CIA became alarmed and members of Gladio, disguised as police, smashed the rally, leaving more than two hundred demonstrators injured.

By 1970, Gelli had emerged as P2’s new Worshipful Master and became known by the code name Filippo66 The lodge now received massive infusions of cash—estimated at $10 million per month—from the CIA’s black funds. This money was used to purchase the weaponry and material necessary to mount terrorist attacks throughout Italy, Greece, Turkey, and South America.

Gelli took special pride in the induction of Carmelo Spagnuolo to his secret society. Spagnuolo was the chief public defender in Milan and, later, the president of the Italian Supreme Court. This ensured that P2, despite its acts of terrorism, would have justice on its side.68 Within ten years of Gelli’s emergence as Worshipful Master, P2 had branches in Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia, France, Portugal, Nicaragua, West Germany, and England. Within the United States, its members and associates included not only leading figures from the Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese crime families, but also such notable political figures as General Alexander Haig, President Nixon’s Chief of Staff, and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State.

As the new leader of P2, Gelli continued to amass telling documents not only on leftist officials but also members of his lodge. When a recruit joined the order, he was obliged to demonstrate his loyalty by conveying to Gelli documents that would compromise not only himself and his family but also other possible candidates.

With Genovese tucked away in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Santo Trafficante Jr., upon the occasion of Luciano’s death in 1962, became by default the head capo of the international heroin trade.

Sindona used mob money and CIA funds to create Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company that became the cornerstone of his financial empire.

Based in Chicago, Continental Illinois was the seventh-largest bank in the country, with billions in assets, including shares in an Opus Dei bank in Barcelona. In 1955, Kennedy became a “conspicuous friend” of the conservative Catholic religious order.15 This friendship resulted in Kennedy’s bank becoming the main channel for the Vatican’s real estate and corporate investments, an arrangement that brought him in close contact to Prince Massimo Spada, the lay delegato of the IOR, and Michele Sindona, Spada’s dutiful assistant. Through this connection, Kennedy emerged as one of Gladio’s key agents, and Continental Illinois came to serve as a major conduit for the flow of covert CIA funds into the newly created BPF. In this way, the Sindona bank served as the principal means of launching the 1967 coup d’état in Greece, a Gladio undertaking spearheaded by a group of right-wing army officers.

Other bankers who shared Gladio’s vision of a New World Order created through the dissolution of political ideologies hostile to American capitalism were willing to have their institutions undergo financial hemorrhages for the cause. David Rockefeller, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, appears to fall into this category as suggested by the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses that came from Chase Manhattan’s investments in South America at the behest of the CIA.29 As Gladio emerged into an international operation, the billions from the drug trade proved insufficient to provide for the mounting expenses.

Castle Bank & Trust became “the conduit for millions of dollars earmarked by the CIA for the funding of clandestine operations directed at countries in Latin America and the Far East.”

Gladio thrived because few world leaders were aware of the scope of the operation and the threat that it posed to sovereignty and independence.

On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, Italy’s prime minister, was kidnapped while on his way to parliament for the opening of debate on the newly formed government of national unity—a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats. The incident occurred when a white Fiat with diplomatic plates pulled in front of his black limousine, forcing the driver to slam on the brakes. Two men from the Fiat and four other assassins who had been waiting on the sidewalk in Alitalia pilot uniforms, opened fire on Moro’s bodyguards, killing all five of them. Moro’s policy of working with and bringing the Communists into the government was denounced both by the USSR and the United States. But no one had been more outraged at the Italian prime minister’s attempt at rapprochement than US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In 1974, when Moro paid a visit to the United States, Kissinger warned him: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration, or you will pay dearly for it.”35 Kissinger’s threat had such a profound effect upon Moro that the prime minister became physically ill and contemplated retirement from government.

While Moro was held captive, his wife Eleonora spent the days in agony together with her closest family and friends, even asking Pope Paul VI for help.

Steve Pieczenik, a former US State Department hostage negotiator and international crisis manager, claimed that he played a “critical role” in Moro’s fate. He had been sent to Italy on the day of the kidnapping by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor,

In Rome, Pieczenik worked with a crisis committee, headed by Francesco Cossiga, Italy’s interior minister. Cossiga, who became Italy’s prime minister in 1979 and president in 1985, had strong ties to Gelli and Gladio.39 Indeed, all of the officials who served on the crisis committee were members of P2

On May 9, 1978, the committee forged a memo, attributed to the Red Brigades, stating that Moro was dead.42 Pieczenik said that the memo, which was leaked to the press, served a dual purpose: to prepare the Italian public for the worst and to let the Red Brigades know that the state would not negotiate for Moro and considered him already dead. “The decision was made in the fourth week of the kidnapping, when Moro’s letters became desperate and he was about to reveal state secrets,” Pieczenik later testified. “It was an extremely difficult decision, but the one who made it in the end was interior minister Francesco Cossiga, and, apparently, also prime minister Giulio Andreotti.”43 When pressed about the committee’s action, Pieczenik added: “We had to sacrifice Aldo Moro to maintain the stability of Italy.”

investigative journalist Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli drew a connection between the death of Moro and Gladio.

Pecorelli wrote that Moro’s kidnapping had been carried out by a “lucid superpower” and was inspired by the “logic of Yalta.” He described the crime as “one of the biggest political operations carried out in recent decades in an industrialized country integrated into the Western system.”46 In one of his last articles, published on January 16, 1979, Pecorelli had written, “We will talk about Steve R. Pieczenik, who participated for three weeks in the interior ministry’s expert meetings, then returned to America before Moro was killed, and reported to Congress that the measures taken by Cossiga on the Moro affair were the best possible in the circumstances.”47 Several months after making these claims, Pecorelli was gunned down near his office on Via Orazio in Rome. The barrel of a gun had been shoved down his throat and the trigger pulled twice. As a classic gesture of the Mafia’s practice of sasso in bocca (stone in the mouth), police officers discovered a stone within Picorelli’s mouth as an announcement that the journalist never again would divulge a secret.

Thanks to the infiltration, which occurred in 1973, the Brigades began to work closely with the Hyperion Language School in Paris, with most brigadiers unaware that it had been founded by the CIA. Hyperion opened an office in Italy shortly before the kidnapping and closed it a few months later. An Italian police report singles out Hyperion as “the most important CIA office in Europe.”49 Founded by Corrado Simioni, a CIA operative who worked with Radio Free Europe; Duccio Berio, an informant to the P2-controlled Italian military intelligence; and Mario Moretti, the CIA operative who was later convicted of killing Aldo Moro, the “school” acted as an intermediary for meetings between Italian and foreign terrorist groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Red Army Faction of Germany, and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (the Basque revolutionary army).

In 1974, four years before the kidnapping, Red Brigade founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini had been arrested in Rome. Franceschini immediately accused Mario Moretti of turning them in, stating that Moretti and Giovanni Senzani, another leading Red Brigade member, were, in fact, CIA spies.

In 1981, Moretti was arrested, apparently by accident, and eventually confessed to the kidnapping. He received six life sentences for the murder but never cooperated with investigators. Cossiga, when he became president of Italy in 1985, pressed for a pardon. Moretti was paroled after fifteen years and presently resides in Milan.53 His early pardon by the Italian court has never been explained.

Fr. Felix Morlion, a Belgian priest, was affiliated with the Hyperion Language School and served to establish a branch of the “school” in Rome.54 During World War II, he had worked closely with Wild Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services by creating Pro Deo a Catholic intelligence agency.

Throughout the 1960s, he remained a pivotal US intelligence agent, as witnessed by his key role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.56 At JFK’s urging, the Dominican priest had attended a strategic meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, where he established a communication channel between Moscow and Washington, mediated by Pope John XXIII, through whom messages were passed that brought an end to the threat of a nuclear war. In 1966, Morlion established, with funding from the CIA, the Pro Deo University which became Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (the International University of Social Studies). As president of the new university, Morlion became a force in the formation of the right-wing policies of the Italian government. He also reportedly began recruiting of terrorists and assassins, including Moretti and Mehmet Ali Ağca (who attempted the hit on John Paul II).

Fr. Antonio Mennini, a Vatican official, served as the intermediary between Moro and his family during the time of the captivity. How Fr. Mennini came to serve in this capacity raises questions about the extent of the Vatican’s involvement in the crime. Fr. Mennini, who claimed to have heard Moro’s last confession, was the son of Luigi Mennini, who served under the direct supervision of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.

Gladio’s role in the strategy of tension might have gone undetected save for the massacre in Bologna. At 10:25 a.m. on August 2, 1980, a time bomb within an unattended suitcase exploded in the crowded, air-conditioned waiting room of the Central Station in Bologna, destroying most of the main building. Eighty-four people were killed in the bombing and more than two hundred wounded, making it the most savage attack to take place on Italian soil since World War II.61 Blame, of course, was placed on the Red Brigades and the radical left. But there was a problem that could not be resolved by the roundup of the usual suspects. The bomb that had been used in Bologna was not an ordinary explosive. It was a sophisticated device made of TNT and Composition B—a device that had been developed for use by the US military. What’s more, the bomb was very similar to the explosives which the Italian police had found in the arms dump near Trieste. The planners had made a mistake—a mistake that was complicated by the presence of members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR, “Armed Revolutionary Nuclei”) at the train station. The NAR, like Ordine Nuovo, was a violent neofascist group, and its leader Valerio Fioravanti, had been slightly injured by blast.

On August 26, the prosecutor of Bologna issued arrest warrants for twenty-six NAR members, who were interrogated in Ferrara, Rome, Padua, and Parma. All, thanks to the intervention of SISMI, were released from custody.63 Gelli and his fellow gladiators were now forced to lead investigators in the wrong direction by bringing forward believable suspects. The web of deception was allegedly woven by Michael Ledeen, a US operative who worked closely with P2 controlled SISMI.

The carefully constructed new report, which was leaked to the Italian press by SISMI, placed the blame for the bombing on a group of international terrorists known as the European National Fascists, whose leader was Karl Heinz Hoffman.66 Hoffman’s group, the phony report alleged, had been trained for the attack in Lebanon by Salah Khalef (also known as Abu Iyad), a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

This explanation might have held despite the fact that it was denied by the PLO and could not be verified by prosecutor Aldo Gentile, who made several trips to Lebanon.

What’s more, on March 7, 1981, a raid on Licio Gelli’s villa uncovered a list of 962 P2 members that included top Italian intelligence, military, media, and political officials in SISMI, along with several prominent Argentines.

The Italian people were aghast to learn that their most powerful political, military, and media leaders were members of the clandestine lodge. But the discovery did not directly link the lodge with the Bologna bombing or the other attacks that had taken place during the years of lead. That link would be eventually found in the Rome airport within the suitcase of Gelli’s daughter. The two documents outlining the master plan of the Masonic group, coupled with the top secret US Army document, were enough to convince Judge Felice Casson and his team of investigators that P2 had been involved in the attacks and that the secret society was acting as a proxy for the CIA.69 What’s more, the investigators realized that the secret society, acting under orders of US officials, had been initiating acts of terror throughout the Western World, and most particularly in Argentina, under the watchful eye if not the blessing of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would ascend to the papal throne as Pope Francis I.

1966 In France President Charles de Gaulle denounced the secret warfare of the Pentagon and expelled the European headquarters of NATO. De Gaulle’s actions were triggered by a series of attempts by the French Gladio unit to assassinate him.

1967 In Greece the Hellenic Raiding Force (Lochos Oreinon Katadromon), which had been integrated into Gladio, overthrew the Greek Defense Ministry, ousted the left-leaning Center Union of George Papandreou, and set up a military dictatorship. When the colonels who led the coup asked Gust Avrakotos, the leading CIA operative in Greece, what to do with Papandreou, he reportedly said: “Shoot the motherfucker because he’s going to come back to haunt you.”4 They ignored this advice and under heavy pressure from American academics, including John Kenneth Galbraith, agreed to release him. In 1974, Papandreou returned to Greece to form the Panhellenic Socialist Movement.